Beware the Ides of March
by Bye11
Summary: "Tu quoque, Brute, fili mi?" This includes spoilers for the extended Alicia's POV on the aftermath of THAT scene
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: My muse has apparently disappeared but that scene in the extended promo wouldn't leave me alone unless I wrote something. Josh Charles' eyes will kill me this season. I'm sure of it. This will be a two-shot, there will be an Alicia's POV after this one. I'm not sure I can actually write angry Will properly but I tried my best to stay IC with his new attitude. The quote here is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar from which I also stole the title. **

_"And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,  
__With Ate by his side come hot from hell,  
__Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice  
__Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war,  
__That this foul deed shall smell above the earth  
__With carrion men, groaning for burial."__  
_

What he remembered acutely was the rage.

Scorching, infernal, scathing and annihilating rage that obliterated everything else. Every other feeling, every attempt at rationality, every external circumstance had been engulfed in the bottomless abyss of his anger.

He had no recollection of the words that had been said after "Alicia is going with them", nor of the seconds it had taken to get to her office and not even of what appliance on her desk had lightly bruised his hand. Those were all collateral elements.

On the other hand, he could recall with exact precision the quintessential urgency to explode and to do it in front of her, to let her watch the detonation of the bomb she had armed. His ire had infinite fuel in the agony he was experiencing. Words were inadequate to express what he was going through but he had thrown some of them together to prolong the physical outburst into a verbal one.

"I hired you."

When nobody else wanted to.

"I pushed for you."

When the entire world seemed to be against you.

"I loved you."

Silence stretched while the third sentence remained unsaid. Even in the middle of the blind folly that had taken hold of him he had managed to spare himself that humiliation.

Even a full day later, he wasn't surprised at just how quickly his love for her had been poisoned by her decision. She had pulled him in and pushed him far, she had started each kiss with anticipation and ended it with a sigh of rejection. She had nurtured the hope that they could be professional and personal partners and beheaded it with a clean swoop when it had become superfluous. She had tugged his heartstrings and severed them without regard. She had accepted his friendship and discarded once the worth had been exhausted. The shield that had protected her on so many occasions had turned suddenly into a vengeful weapon , now that she had chosen to leave his side. A weapon he was fully prepared to use.

"What? Have I made you speechless? Wasn't it only yesterday that words of loyalty flowed right out of your silver tongue on national television?"

He had been watching, drink in hand, as always, and those pledges to her husband that he had considered half-lies had been revealed the following day as full truths.

She was shocked, maybe a touch fearful and he reveled in making her uncomfortable, in letting her know the kind of monster she had generated with her deception.

"Are you a masochist? Is that it, Alicia? Do you need to be publicly humiliated and betrayed in order to be devoted?"

His voice had gotten louder. Let the entire firm bear witness to the full range of his anger. Let them marvel at his behavior in worry and disgust. Fear and hatred could not do worse than what safety and love had accomplished.

Her answer had been unexpected. He had imagined her to stay silent or to break in a series of useless sorrys. Instead, she had been firm even in a tone of voice that was a little more than a whisper.

"You don't mean that."

A few minutes before he wouldn't have. But in that moment, his brain was re-editing each one of their memories, spoiling them with the knowledge of what would come later. All the subtle rejections now marking a pattern that he should have recognized as headed towards destruction. Now that she had rendered everything he had done for her a laughable collection of foolish actions he did mean it. Peter had thrown her violently off the pedestal of her perfect life and he got affection and commitment, he had been the one to give her a hand to get up, he had paved the way for her thriving success and what had he gotten for his trouble? A well-struck knife in his back. Oh, yes, he meant it.

"But I do. "

She seemed to falter at this revelation. Time to press on. Dispersed the loving cloud that had always surrounded her, he could now assess her almost objectively. Masochist but also cunning, manipulative, shrewd.

"Or is it just that you and your husband are true soul-mates? Tell me, have you compared notes, plotting how to best assure my demise? Grand jury wasn't enough and so now it's your turn to try?"

She looked as if she had been slapped. Words were doing a decent-enough job after all. She recovered swiftly though.

"Will, if you believe something, please believe this. I never meant to hurt you."

The sentence incensed him even more. He was so damn unimportant to her that his complete downfall was in the subcategory that gets most easily swept under the rug: collateral damage.

He was lunging for his next verbal attack when a voice interrupted him.

"Will, that's enough. Alicia is going."

"I'll say when it's enough."

He was ready to reverse his fury on the investigator too when Kalinda interposed herself between him and Alicia and painfully constricted both of his arms with her hands.

"Will, this is not you."

His first impulse had been to swat her off like the nuisance she was being. What did she know about who he was anyway? He himself didn't know how far the new Will was willing to take the perverse revenge that he would inflict on Alicia. He had to keep moving, he had to see the object of his rage and try to drag her with him into the dark and rapid descent towards an unforgiving Hell.

But then the distraction Kalinda had provided had been enough for Alicia to hurriedly grab her bag and flee towards the door.

A big part of him wanted nothing more than to corner her in the elevator, so that they both could say words that would not be forgotten and that would permanently debase whatever they had shared to a twisted delusion he would archive never to be revisited again.

Diane was approaching though, and a line of people had formed to guarantee Alicia safe passage.

He let her go but not without a last remark.

"Enjoy every second of every minute of every day Alicia. Every smiling photo supporting your husband, every family dinner, every victory at your shiny new firm. Enjoy but watch your back, and your front and your sides. Make no mistake, I will destroy you. And it still won't make us even."

He turned around and never saw what effect, if any, his threat had had on her. He had been too afraid to uncover, with a single look, an awful truth: despite everything, hurting her was still painful.

* * *

He wished he could blame Kalinda for the monstrous headache he was experiencing. After all, she had been the one to insist that he needed to "drink it out". The truth was that there was no way he could have spent the night before sober. Alcohol had to have been invented for situations like his.

Kalinda had been by his side ever since he had been left alone in Alicia's office. She had nodded to Diane and then escorted him out when the situation had been placated. He had tried to protest a bit but unconvincingly. He would not have been focused to work or do anything else other than yell anyway.

She had insisted in getting food in him before bringing him to a bar he had never seen before. He had liked the interior. Shady enough that nobody would care if he drowned in scotch but not worrying enough for fear to prevent the dulling of senses.

At some point, during the part of the night that still existed in his mind he had gone back on topic.

"You shouldn't have stopped me."

"Why?"

"I had things to say. I deserved to say things."

"Things?"

"I didn't even say that I hate her."

"Oh, please, Will. Children say they hate each other."

"Maybe, it doesn't make it any less true."

"It makes it just one out of many feelings."

"You're right. I hate her and I'm furious with her."

"And you love her."

"You can't think so low of me."

"A love like yours doesn't disappear overnight, I doubt it can disappear in the time it took you to get to her office."

"You're wrong. Love can disappear in the instant you find out she's betrayed you."

"Then why are you still pining?"

"I'm not pining, I'm planning my revenge."

"Planning your revenge looked a lot different when it was just Cary and the others."

"She is the First Lady and she has more clients."

"Sure, that must be it."

They had both gulped their respective drinks and he had thought the conversation over when she intervened.

"I'm sorry, Will. You didn't deserve it."

"Sure I did, I broke rule number one."

"Do you need me to ask?"

"I do."

"What's rule number one?"

"Mr. Finch, the lawyer in charge of us associates in Baltimore made us earn our lessons. First case won, first rule. "Always be paranoid. There's always someone out to get you!". I wasn't paranoid enough. Otherwise, I would have seen."

"What would that have changed? Knowing before?"

"Days not spent thinking she walked on water."

"I'm sorry."

"I don't want your pity."

"I'm not offering any."

"Then what is the sorry for?"

"It's a fact. I'm sorry. I'll help you fix it."

"There's no fixing it. Only revenge."

"I'll be there."

"Are you sure?"

"What do you mean?"

"I might be deflating now but I'm still furious as hell. No rules, no compassion, no nothing. I won't stop until I've crushed them... her."

"I know."

"This is me now. I won't accept any more interference."

She had seemed troubled but she had nodded.

* * *

The sunshine was streaming from his windows flooding the place with unpleasant light. The world, as always, was carrying on without attention to his misfortunes. He stopped to watch the view outside, eyes still adjusting and head throbbing. For a flickering instant the image of him and Alicia sharing that view during a long weekend flashed in his mind. He allowed himself a minute or two of mourning his misguided hopes for a shared happiness. Then he summoned his rage and started his day.

What he remembered acutely was the rage. What he would not forget was the pain.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Many thanks to Josie for finding the exact moment that I'm discussing in this chapter so that I could put it in the icon for this story. The quote that was actually the reason for the existence of this chapter comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar again. Brutus is talking at Caesar's funeral. Happy premiere on Sunday/Monday according to your timezone! Hiatus is finally over :)**

_"... If there be any in this assembly, __any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more."_

She couldn't stand people being nice to her.

In the elevator, all coddling and saying "sorry", "that was grossly inappropriate", "he was out of his mind". She ran away from all of them, passersby in her and Will's lives that butted in and passed harsh judgments when none were required.

All the way to her car in the garage, she kept focusing on the click of her heels on the pavement, walking faster, almost running so that her body, focused on her heavy breathing, would have no energy left to even formulate a thought. She wasn't ready. Not yet.

While driving away, she had called Grace to check on that Math test she had been so worried about and then Eli asking if she really had to be at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new wing of the hospital.

"Of course you have to go. The children are waiting for you, Alicia, and you don't want to disappoint the children, do you?"

"I'll go."

She had cut off the phone call before she could synesthetically hear Eli's triumphal grin on the other side of the line.

Any other day but not that particular day.

She had felt so empowered, all functional in her routine and switching seamlessly between her roles that once at her destination, she was turning back. Maybe there was no need for her to be alone in the empty terrace overlooking Chicago. Her training as a politician's wife had finally prevailed. She was unbreakable.

Then, suddenly, all her vim deserted her.

She could not find the strength to start her car again. A simple movement of the key rotating seemed impossible.

In that moment of stillness, it all came back.

The conversation, the harsh words, his look. She tried to conjure the anger that had surged though her when he had accused her of being nothing more of a masochistic, pathetic excuse of a woman.

In vain.

The image stuck in her head was that glassy speck in his eyes.

For a fleeting second, during that "I pushed for you", his eyes had betrayed him and among the bursting rage she had seen the pain. He had hidden it fast, naturally, under cruel words that would have earned him and anybody else a slap under any other circumstance.

But in her car, away from the world that expected her to behave in a certain way, nothing else mattered but his suffering.

"I hired you."

"I pushed for you."

Silence. So much left unsaid. She had expected him to say just one more thing.

"I was your friend."

And more, always more than a friend.

The tears had started to cascade irregularly on her cheeks, leaving her vision blurred and dull to everything around her. To say she was crying would be accurate but such an understatement.

Because this was Will.

The one that had dared to offer her a drink after their very first verbal battle to the death.

The one that had shown up at her dorm room with tequila and stolen the additional books from Claire to help her cope with her Criminal-Law-induced bouts of paranoia.

The one that had sent her a message a few days after the scandal without condolences or sorrys. "As Professor Sanders said on that last day: "Sometimes a fuck them all is the best motivation there is." Will". And she had laughed while she had believed herself doomed to tears.

He had welcomed her back into the fold after 13 years, showered her with subtle compliments, reminded her of just how at ease she felt around the law, made her lighten up with his presence and gave her a chance to lose herself again without fear getting in the way.

But she had lost herself too much.

He was too brilliant, too attractive, too complicit, too charming, too funny. And she had been reduced to the laughable cliché of being the one that shivered for his touch. The clear-headed Alicia gone whenever he was near.

Too tempting.

She had risked her reputation, the well-being of her family, for her own impulses. It had to stop.

There. Rational reasoning would get her back on track.

She took a tissue from her bag and tried to recover her forgotten adulthood. Everyone had priorities. Everyone had to look out for their family. If she had to power through pain, she would.

"Are you a masochist? Is that it, Alicia?"

Of course she wasn't. She had responsibilities, she wouldn't apologize for that. He had lived life without knowing what it meant to say vows, to see her husband fall in love with her again years after that first "I do" or to hold her children crying over their parents' separation. None of that was in his baggage of bachelor experiences. He couldn't know. He shouldn't judge.

"Will, this is not you."

As soon as she had felt herself regain control, she was undone again.

Kalinda had spoken the words she herself had wanted to. That raging, poison-spewing man was not her Will.

And it was because of her.

No matter how much she tried to stack the cards in her favor, no matter how much she repeated the litany of why logically it had all made sense, she couldn't escape that truth.

She had transformed the smirking, joke-cracking man she had met in the elevator in the early morning, in a bitter, spiteful shell that made a spectacle out of himself for the whole firm to prey on.

There was no way around that.

It hadn't been all her. She knew that. There had been Cary and the others, the discussions with Diane, her path to the judgeship but she had been the one to push him stumbling over the edge. Every jury in Chicago would convict her of at least that.

Not that she hadn't known.

There just had been so much to do. The interviews, the "classy but necessary", Eli-mandated photo shoots, Zach graduating, the excessive blondeness and general Amber-Madison-ess of Peter's new ethics consultant, the plotting to keep her coup a secret from all the equity partners. Her mom taking Grace lingerie shopping. Peter and their marriage. All the lies.

Her crime had merely been to put it off, to not dwell on how it would look to him, everything that she had done. It had been a defense mechanism. There had been a point in which she had taken his feelings in consideration but the depth and the intensity of her reaction had scared her into retreat. No, she most certainly was not ready to open that door. Every day was one day more. Just one more day for the plan to come to fruition, for the decisions to be irrevocable, for her to be sure.

There would be no more days now. And she still was not sure.

There was a part of her that craved to get back and tell him that none of that day had ever happened, that she was still the Alicia he had smirked at, all wet and freezing out of the pool. He could still smile and narcissistically believe that the huge win of the day before was all due to him and not his slam-dunk case. He could still count her in that web of camaraderie, fun and friendship he had built over the years. He could still trust her. He could still like her a lot more than what was appropriate. He could exist without hating her.

She wished she could. But the clock of her dream world had already struck midnight. The delusions revealed themselves for nothing more than smoke figurines her brain had molded to let her move forward. The have-it-all life was just waiting for her at home. A family that loved her more than she deserved. A new firm with competent and eager partners, with the chance of handling the law as she had always wished, a crowd of strangers that admired her from afar for all the values she represented, for the life she had lived. She was loved, adored, respected. Wasn't it the goal of anyone's life?

What she had sacrificed to get there was nothing compared to what she had gained and kept safe. That was supposed to be her line of thoughts. Chicago was a city made of politicians. To get anywhere one could not be spotless. There had to be a freckle of red, the blood of someone that had been succumbed to a greater cause. She knew that. That was what anybody would tell her in luxurious hotel halls among flowing overpriced wines and tailored clothes.

Yet none of them knew what Will had truly meant to her.

They hadn't been in that Presidential Suite being looked at as the only person that was vital for his existence, they hadn't watched the coyness playing on his face while he admitted he "wasn't interested in anybody else". Nor had they heard the 16th most-eligible bachelor offer to meet their kids, as naturally as he offered advice on a legal conundrum.

Nobody except her could grasp just how much Will had been paramount to her healing. How important his opinion had been. How she had cherished his utter confidence in her capabilities. How she wouldn't forget the laughs, the shared eye-rollings, and that air of tantalizingly reliable freedom that always seemed to surround him.

In her success, she was alone. There wasn't one person in the world she could talk to, that would just let her explain why she had made a choice that would leave her mourning a man and an unrealized potential for love. Not without judgments, or advice. Owen would listen but she was afraid of what he could say, Peter was certainly not a candidate, Kalinda, that loved Will in her own way, would not understand. She was on her own.

She had annihilated the only constant friendship in her life for her own benefit. No greater purpose than the well-being of her immediate family. She had never had the courage to ask Peter if he had forgiven himself for just how carelessly he had treated the bond of trust between the two of them. She had always been afraid of his answer irking her one way or the other. And now that things were going well... No reason to rock the boat. Regardless, she desperately wanted to today. All the questions that had swarmed in her head but that she had never voiced, trapped in the weight of consequences.

She needed those answers. She had to know, to copy, to learn.

"Have you forgiven yourself, Peter?"

"How could you look at me after what you had done?"

"How could you stand tall and survive day after day knowing that somewhere, someone you cared about, someone you loved, was hurting because of you?"

Yet she couldn't even employ her humiliation in her benefit. She couldn't ask without Peter gauging why she was asking, without him pushing on her feelings for Will. Vulnerable how she was, she probably would go on and say those three words that would make everything she had done moot, an exercise in futile devastation.

She wouldn't risk that.

It surprised her how easily she had conjured those three words in a hypothetical fight with Peter. She had never allowed herself to think of Will that way. Love came with too many strings, with obligations. She wouldn't have been able to explain it away, so she had refused to label whatever she felt for Will love. Simple. But denial could not work in front of facts. The impulse she had experienced of getting round the desk and kiss the pain away from him wasn't merely lust for the angry version of Will. It was a need she recognized very well as the primal necessity to protect and shield people you loved.

And, truly, who had she been kidding?

She had used all the other possible combination of words in the vocabulary but none fit because none were the truth. She was in love with him.

She could visualize, with astonishing clarity, the scene of how the what-if would have played. She would have waited for the office to be deserted. He would have been stressed over the full extent of the coup and the number of clients that had been stolen. She would have appeared in his office.

"Will, can I talk to you for a second?"

He would have abandoned everything else and given her his full attention. His brow would have turned worried in asking his usual follow-up question.

"Is something wrong?"

She wouldn't have wasted any time.

"I love you, Will"

He would have looked surprised, positively shocked at the unexpected declaration. She would have smiled then and nodded.

"And I'm tired of hiding it."

His eyes would have turned tender and caring, his smile suddenly conveying more happiness that he had ever shown.

"I love you."

He would have said, before kissing her passionately.

A thought emerged to intrude in the fantasy.

He would never know now. He would never know how she felt about him. If, during one of the many future yelling matches, she happened to use those words, he wouldn't believe her. What she had done had deprived the words of any meaning. They were merely hollow series of letters without significance. She had robbed herself of the possibility of saying "I love you" and him of the chance to hear it from her. He would go on thinking that he had been nothing more than a pawn in her game, that she had used him to get even with Peter, that he had been a convenient stopgap.

How hadn't she taken it all into account? How had she lost sight of all the different ways she was hurting Will and, in turn, herself?

The phone begged for her attention but her voice was still too teary to talk to Peter. She waited for the ringing to stop and focused on the photo on the background.

The answer to everything was in those three faces that smiled at her. Her family was everything. They would unknowingly help her through this difficult time.

Will wouldn't forgive her but he would recover. She would hate herself less and less the more he got back on his feet, the more he hated her. It had to be. Time would pass and she would learn to bear the burden without crumbling under the weight.

Life would go on for the victim and the perpetrator.

If, at times, the regret, the guilt and the love threatened to suffocate her, she would look at the photo and breathe.

Breathe and remember priority number 1.


End file.
